


Inevitable Truth

by strix_alba



Category: Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Patricia Wrede
Genre: Alternate Universe - Trans, Gen, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-01 23:47:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4039309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she was seven, Cimorene informed her parents, the King and Queen, that she was not going to grow up to be a prince, but a princess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inevitable Truth

When she was seven, Cimorene informed her parents, the King and Queen, that she was not going to grow up to be a prince, but a princess. Her mother patted her on the head and gave her father a worried look. Later that week, the King had instructed Val, Cimorene’s Royal Tutor, to lecture his future heir in the facts of life. 

Cimorene listened patiently until he had coughed and muttered his way through the lecture, before she taught him a few facts of her own. Her Royal tutor reported these facts to the King, who, deeply worried for the prince’s state of mind, consulted the court philosopher. The court philosopher pointed out that, with five sisters, Cimorene was doubtless confused by the differing roles, and recommended more father-son bonding time. As a consequence, Cimorene spent every Sunday from noon to dinnertime riding around the countryside with the King, surveying the land and training the royal falcons. Since this was a good deal more interesting than the history lessons which had previously been relegated to Sunday afternoons — her tutor tended towards sudden and mysterious deafness if she tried to persuade him to tell her stories about princesses and brave ladies-in-waiting in addition to tales of the kings and knights — Cimorene didn’t complain. She did tune out the King’s speeches about the pride a man felt in being able to provide food and a house for his family. Those qualities, it seemed to her, were entirely separate from falconry.

****

When she was older, she would put away her jousting equipment after each lesson and march down to the kitchen to hover over the servants there, until finally, the Head Cook could be persuaded that the Crown Prince’s desire to learn how to cook was not a passing fancy coming from a place of superiority. Day after day, Cimorene went from doing battle with a wooden lance against a quintain to doing battle with a wooden rolling pin against the dough for chicken pot pie. Her parents, not knowing of the latter and seeing the enthusiasm with which she took to the former, assumed that the changes enacted in the raising of their offspring had been successful, and that all was as they wished it to be in their world. Their praise of her fencing and jousting skills seemed excessive to Cimorene — as though waving around a sharp piece of metal was indicative of anything but one’s ability to wave around a sharp piece of metal — but she allowed that her parents were still mired in their traditions. They wouldn’t always be able to ignore the inevitable. 

****

She was thirteen when her father found out about the cooking. 

“Cook provides for her family,” she said, on one of her outings with the King. 

The King had only ever met the head cook once. “Does she,” he hummed. 

Cimorene was irritated enough to mistake the statement for a question, so she forged ahead. “Her husband is in jail for tax fraud, so she supports her daughters at home. And she’s still a woman.” 

Her words penetrated through the cloud of falcon-related thoughts crowding the King’s mind. He blinked at his youngest child. “Where did you hear that?” he asked. 

“She told me,” Cimorene said. It had been directly after telling her to _punch the dough harder, boy, pretend it’s that tutor you’re always going on about_ , and directly before shouting at one of her assistants to rescue the pheasant from the fire. 

The King frowned. “Did she, now,” he said.

The cooking lessons met a swift demise after that, despite Cimorene’s protests.

****

To her eternal frustration, it was Cimorene, not her parents, whose ability to deny the inevitable was tested first. The day that Cimorene’s voice cracked for the first time, she fled from the Grand Semiformal Reception Room so that the King and Queen and their advisors would not see her eyes as tears welled up against her will. And when she was done with crying, she went to the assistant of the royal apothecary and begged her to teach Cimorene how to do makeup to hide the evidence. The apothecary’s assistant smiled knowingly as she handed her a fine horsehair brush and a small jar of powder, to store in the secret drawer under her bed. She smiled less knowingly when Cimorene returned in the ensuing weeks to learn how to apply rouge and to paint her lips and nails. Those around her could ignore it all they wanted, but Cimorene reasoned that, just as a human could not avoid seeing invisible objects once they had consumed a magic toadstool under a red moon, so too, could the entirety of the Royal Court continue to deny that Cimorene was a princess when it was so obvious to her that she was. Maybe she just had to make it more obvious to them. 

“You’re not thinking of running away to the circus, are you?” the apothecary’s assistant asked, fingers twisting. 

Cimorene stretched her lips across her teeth and raised her eyebrows as she applied lipstick in the mirror, even though pulling faces was less-than-desirable expression for someone of her station. _There’s an idea, she thought for a moment, before discarding it_. “No,” she said. “Not the circus. Circuses don’t have a steady yearly income.” 

***

Cimorene had not permitted anyone to cut her hair since she was eight. Cimorene had been making small repairs to her own torn clothing for the past three years. She could clean a pot almost as well as the Head Chef’s First Assistant, and if she were of an impractically violent disposition, she could disarm and dismember (with a broadsword, scimitar, and a boning knife) anyone who told her that she could not, should not, do any of those things. 

When Cimorene left the palace with a satchel thrown over her back, she left behind her royal suit of armor and went forth in a dress she had altered to fit across shoulders that were narrower than her father would like and more broad than she cared to think about. She plaited her hair into two thick black ropes that were wound around her head and pinned out of the way, and she carried a heavy rolling pin in her right hand. 

“No proper princess would come out looking for dragons,” Woraug informed her, and Cimorene scowled. 

“I didn’t say I was a proper princess,” Cimorene snapped. “But I _am_ a princess.” 

The dragons all looked at each other, reptilian faces impossible to read. “Well, yes. None of us are arguing that,” said the green dragon to Woraug’s left, sounding amused, and Cimorene held her head up high.


End file.
